The Art of Political Murder (33 page)

Claudia Méndez seemed even younger than her twenty-three years. She was a pretty young woman, with dark hair falling past her shoulders, prominent dimples, and large, vivid eyes. Girlishly perky, deferential and attentive yet unthreatening—or so men thought when they first met her—she appeared to be a model of
old-fashioned Latin American femininity, at least if one overlooked the fact that she was a crime reporter for a Guatemala City daily. Méndez was also an evangelical Protestant, and thus in many ways a true social and cultural conservative. The men Méndez interviewed often called her
nena
, “little girl,” and they sometimes patronized her. She had a way of listening, and of questioning, so direct that it seemed to disarm her subject's defenses. The men often ended up speaking to her as if she were a trusted younger sister rather than a journalist.

“Tell me, Captain, are you growing desperate in prison?” Claudia Méndez began her interview with Captain Byron Lima, who had already been imprisoned in the Centro Preventivo for a year and two months. “Hasn't incarceration been frustrating for a military man whose career had promised such a bright future?” The photograph accompanying the interview showed an olive-skinned, athletic figure in a Kaibil special-forces T-shirt, his arms extended in a spidery reach to grasp the chicken-wire prison fence as he spoke to the reporter on the other side. Captain Lima replied to Méndez's bold query with bravado: soon he'd be free, and he had no doubt that he'd be able to rejoin the Army. On the other hand, he also wanted the start of the trial to be postponed, though it had already been postponed more than once.

“And why do you want more time?” asked Méndez.

“Because this isn't going to be easy,” the captain said. “The Catholic Church wants to make more money off the case….”

Méndez interrupted him. “But why do
you
want more time?” she asked. “Sometimes you seem desperate.”

“No. Being in prison doesn't make me desperate. What makes me desperate is the small amount of loyalty shown by my
compañeros
—loyalty and support in the economic and moral sense. They believe that something like this could never happen to them.”

“What are you referring to? Are you saying that other military men could fall because of this crime?”

“I'm saying that this is a problem that begins at a certain point, and will explode”—he made an exploding gesture with his hands—“whether it be under the Ministry of Defense's desk or in the Presidential Military Staff.”

“What are you trying to say? That they are involved? That the EMP was behind the crime? Because that's what's always been said.”

“That. They arrest innocent people to destroy the Army.” The captain switched gear, making a display of his own loyalty, taking refuge in the official defense line, but then restating his warning: “When I talk about the lack of loyalty I mean we soldiers should support each other institutionally…. They have to wake up and stop thinking they'll never be involved in a case like this one. They have to understand this process, what's going on here, and what can happen to them if they're not careful.”

“It seems you're sending a message with that answer.”

“Yes, I'm sending one, and I'm saying, Wake up!”

“To whom, Captain? To whom are you sending that message?”

“To all of them! All of them! This subliminal message is for the people who will recognize it as meant for them.”

Claudia Méndez took the interview in another direction. “Nobody knew that Carlos García Pontaza, the prisoner who was killed in this prison just a few weeks ago, was to be a witness proposed by you. Was he a key element of your defense?” Captain Lima had included García Pontaza in his list of defense witnesses.

“He knew a lot about the case,” Captain Lima replied.

O
N
N
OVEMBER
28, 2000, Carlos García Pontaza, Ana Lucía Escobar's former boyfriend, the young leader of the Valle del Sol gang, who was wanted for bank robbery, had been arrested in a town far outside the capital. Most unusually, a helicopter was sent to fly him back to the city, to the Centro Preventivo prison where the Limas and Villanueva were also being held, the prison in which Captain Lima was said to patrol the cell blocks in a black
ski mask, in the company of armed prison guards. Two months later, García Pontaza was found dead in his cell with a single bullet wound in his head. His death was quickly ruled a suicide, but few believed that. (For one thing, García Pontaza was left-handed, and the bullet had been fired into his right temple.) In the weeks before his death, García Pontaza had made a series of increasingly frantic phone calls to MINUGUA, saying that he was afraid for his life. He'd phoned Leopoldo Zeissig too. He wanted protected-witness status and was offering to name public officials involved in organized crime.

Military Intelligence agents from the EMP and at least one emissary from the Public Ministry had visited García Pontaza in prison. They came to pressure him into implicating Ana Lucía Escobar in the murder of Bishop Gerardi, along with other Church figures, particularly Monseñor Hernández. An investigator from MINUGUA told me that Gustavo Soria, the assistant to the former special prosecutor, Otto Ardón, was one of the young gangster's visitors at the prison. Soria was reputed to have ties to Military Intelligence. A report by MINUGUA on the incident said that García Pontaza was told that if he incriminated Ana Lucía, he would be granted “complete impunity and logistical support for his criminal operations.” But García Pontaza refused that fantastic offer. He couldn't, the young gangster told MINUGUA, falsely accuse his former girlfriend. MINUGUA's investigation also established that García Pontaza had had contact, personally and by telephone, with Captain Byron Lima.

So there it was: the case's most romantic episode, appropriately fatal. García Pontaza's unexpectedly stubborn integrity must have been extremely frustrating to the defense. Imagine the explosive testimony he could have provided. Imagine being a young gangster, promised complete immunity from prosecution
and
the logistical support of a clandestine intelligence unit in carrying out crimes. (It would be even better than belonging to the EMP, because during time off from committing crimes—kidnapping,
extorting, cocaine trafficking, etc.—you wouldn't have to obey orders from officers, or go horseback riding with the president and first lady, or sleep in barracks.) Who fired the bullet into the faithful delinquent's head? Did his killer look him in the eye and give him one last chance to change his mind? Did he count to ten? Did García Pontaza—who in 1999 had enrolled for two semesters to study French in the public university's school of languages—have a chance to reflect on the consequences of his choice as he listened to the countdown?

In the hours before dawn on January 29, 2001, the ringing of cell phones woke a few Guatemala City reporters in their beds. When they answered, they heard the voice of Captain Lima. Given the hour, the place he was calling from, and the gravity of the occasion, that voice must have been unusually solemn and quiet. The captain was dutifully phoning from prison to let reporters know that Carlos García Pontaza was dead. The telephone calls left some reporters with a creepy feeling.

“A
ND WHAT DID HE
”—García Pontaza—“know?” Claudia Méndez asked Captain Lima during their interview.

“I can't say, because it pulls other people in. It would pull them in with a force that not even the police would be able to stop. A force that would pull in many people of all kinds: lawyers, priests, people from organizations that receive money.”

Sometimes a murdered witness can do that, leave a gift to the living; he can even leave salvation. But the murdered witness has to have left a record somewhere: a confession, a list of names, a tape recording,
something
.

“How important was his testimony for your defense?”

“Extremely important.”

Lawyers and judges, priests, people from organizations that receive money, such as ODHA. All were implicated in the murder, and all were engaged in a criminal conspiracy of fabricated witnesses and testimony. That was the defense, and would remain so
throughout the trial and long after. The accusation didn't seem to have much force. Then, later, strangely, it would. The key witness who refused to speak would be forgotten, but his silence would be stolen, as if by grave robbers; the words some wished the gangster had spoken would find zombie-like life, in the arguments of the Limas and their defense lawyers, in newspaper columns written by their supporters in the press, in a book, in Guatemala and beyond.

There had been times when some had thought Captain Lima was close to admitting a role in the murder of Bishop Gerardi. Why had he, for example, announced to the press that he had in his possession—hidden under lock and key somewhere—the watch, the chain, and the keys to the VW Golf and the San Sebastián parish house that had been taken from the bishop's body? He'd mentioned also a receipt for a delivery from Pollo Campero, an order of fried chicken, to the parish house for the night of April 26, 1998—a clear reference and “subliminal” warning to Father Mario.

“And why haven't you presented Monseñor's watch and chain?” asked Claudia Méndez. “You said you had them.”

“No, I didn't say I had them. I said someone showed them to me.”

“You said you had them. You announced it to all the media.”

“No, I said I saw them. I don't have them. If I had them, they'd blame everything on me. I saw them because somebody came and showed them to me.”

“And why aren't you presenting that person as a witness?”

“Because I don't have the money. They all want money.”

“And with all these misunderstandings, how do you think things are going to go for you in the trial?”

“Good. At least I hope things will turn out all right for my father.”

“And you?”

“How long can they keep me here? Five years?”

Claudia Méndez brought up the possibility that he could even face the death penalty if found guilty.

“But if that's how destiny turns out, what can I do?” A few exchanges later, the captain said, “Anyway, look, what does the prosecutor have on me: the declaration of a homeless bum!”

A
YEAR BEFORE
, in March 2000, the Limas, on the advice of their defense attorneys, had petitioned Judge García Villatoro for a chance to expand on their earlier declarations. The request was granted, and on that occasion Captain Lima had provided a more detailed account of his travels in the ten days before the bishop's murder, coordinating security arrangements for President Arzú's visits to Peru and Argentina. In this new statement, his account of the day he arrived back in Guatemala—Sunday, April 26, 1998, the day of the murder—took an odd and memorable turn.

He had gone from the airport to the presidential residence, where he was picked up by his friend Erick Urízar. They left the EMP headquarters in Urízar's car, heading for Lima's parents' house in Colonia Lourdes. On the way, he said, they stopped for a police roadblock at the Asunción Bridge. Erick Urízar was asked for his papers and then ordered to get out of the car and show the weapon he was carrying. Captain Lima identified himself as a military officer and handed over his credentials. The police insisted that the photograph on Lima's identification card was of a different person. That was because, Lima said, he'd recently grown a light beard. As Captain Lima was trying to explain the situation over the radio to the policeman's superior, he said, another officer from the EMP, Colonel Roy Dedet Catzprowitz, coincidentally arrived at the roadblock in his car and had the same hassle with police over his papers and weapon as Lima and Urízar were having. Two minutes later a security vehicle assigned to Colonel Rudy Pozuelos, the head of the EMP, also arrived at the roadblock and was also detained. Captain Lima said that he phoned the EMP, and that the chief of Protection
Services, Major Francisco Escobar Blas, was dispatched to the roadblock to straighten the mess out.

It was like a slapstick movie scene in which all the main characters unexpectedly converge at one spot for a farcical denouement. The incident at the roadblock, as Captain Lima had told it, was highly unlikely; probably, it never occurred. More likely, Captain Lima had been sending yet another “subliminal message,” or a warning. He'd peopled his fictional account of a roadblock with other officers from the EMP, perhaps those who'd had a role in Bishop Gerardi's murder, entering their names in the public record of the case.

In her interview, Claudia Méndez pressed the captain about the roadblock. “There are those,” she said, “who say you were trying in that statement to remind them of something. Was that what you were doing?”

Captain Lima said no. But then he mentioned more names. Méndez had asked him whom he admired, and in addition to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet he cited General Otto Pérez Molina, a Guatemalan officer who, Captain Lima said, always stood by his men. Méndez omitted this detail from the article she published, not realizing its potential significance. Rubén Chanax would later claim that General Pérez Molina was one of the officers who had come into Don Mike's little store with Colonel Lima Estrada on the night of the murder. It was assumed by the prosecution that the officers had gathered in Don Mike's to monitor the crime, but there was an even more logical reason for them to be there. The murder of Bishop Gerardi was the most audacious and risky assassination the Guatemalan Army had ever attempted, and it must be perceived as a defense of the institution rather than of individuals. No military man should be able to shirk responsibility. Everybody's tail should be snagged—a ring of tigers holding each other's tails in their jaws.

What did Captain Lima want from all the people he'd named? Was he telling them that he wasn't going to take the
fall, silently and alone? Or that if he was, he expected something in return?